in a happy moment for himself and his party, was induced to offer Burke a post as his private secretary.  A government by country gentlemen is too apt to be a government of ignorance, and Lord Rockingham was without either experience or knowledge.  He felt, or friends felt for him, the advantage of having at his side a man who was chiefly known as an author in the service of Dodsley, and as having conducted the Annual Register with great ability, but who even then was widely spoken of as nothing less than an encyclopaedia of political knowledge.

It is commonly believed that Burke was commended to Lord Rockingham by William Fitzherbert.  Fitzherbert was President of the Board of Trade in the new government, but he is more likely to be remembered as Dr. Johnson’s famous example of the truth of the observation, that a man will please more upon the whole by negative qualities than by positive, because he was the most acceptable man in London, and yet overpowered nobody by the superiority of his talents, made no man think worse of himself by being his rival, seemed always to listen, did not oblige you to hear much from him, and did not oppose what you said.  Besides Fitzherbert’s influence, we have it on Burke’s own authority that his promotion was partly due to that mysterious person, William Burke, who was at the same time appointed an under-secretary of state.  There must have been unpleasant rumours afloat as to the Burke connection, and we shall presently consider what they were worth.  Meanwhile, it is enough to say that the old Duke of Newcastle hurried to the new premier, and told him the appointment would never do; that the new secretary was not only an Irish adventurer, which was true, but that he was an Irish papist, which was not true; that he was a Jesuit, that he was a spy from Saint Omer’s, and that his real name was O’Bourke.  Lord Rockingham behaved like a man of sense and honour, sent for Burke, and repeated to him what he had heard.  Burke warmly denounced the truthlessness of the Duke’s tattle.  He insisted that the reports which his chief had heard would probably, even unknown to himself, create in his mind such suspicions as would stand in the way of a thorough confidence.  No earthly consideration, he said, should induce him to continue in relations with a man whose trust in him was not entire; and he pressed his resignation.  To this Lord Rockingham would not consent, and from that time until his death, seventeen years afterwards, the relations between them were those of loyal and honourable service on the one hand, and generous and appreciative friendship on the other.  Six and twenty years afterwards (1791) Burke remembered the month in which he had first become connected with a man whose memory, he said, will ever be precious to Englishmen of all parties, as long as the ideas of honour and virtue, public and private, are understood and cherished in this nation.